Fateless asks questions in the wake of Auschwitz that need to be answered in the present, since, as Kertész insists, the Holocaust cannot be written about in the past tense. What does it mean to be Jewish? How do we become free? Auschwitz is the zero point of European culture—it marks the death of God, the beginning of solitude, and, surprisingly, the potential to fulfill a promise of liberty. IJ
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1900s
The Dead Father
Donald Barthelme
Lifespan | b. 1931 (U.S.), d. 1989
First Published | 1975
First Published by | Farrar, Straus & Giroux (N. Y.)
Jesse H. Jones Award | 1976
A seminal work of Postmodernist fiction, The Dead Father ostensibly tells the tale of the journey of a Dead Father (who “is only dead in a sense”) across the countryside in search of an object called The Golden Fleece. This monolithic father (an imposing and ridiculous 3,200 cubits long) is towed by a crew of nineteen men. The Golden Fleece will rejuvenate the Dead Father and, he is assured, restore him to his former position of authority as the father of all culture. Erratic and tyrannical, the Dead Father spends his time seducing women, lamenting his lost youth, and, whenever he is so inclined, slaughtering indiscriminately those unfortunate enough to be within striking distance. It soon transpires, however, that he is being conducted not toward a place of rejuvenation but toward his burial.
In this merciless assault upon “authority”, Donald Barthelme systematically slays the sacred cows of Western culture: Freudiansim is lampooned, high priests of Modernism such as Eliot and Joyce are parodied, and any notion of an objective “truth” discarded. His freewheeling narrative is comprised of seemingly inconsequential digressions that only provisionally coalesce around a meaningful plot. With its wholesale departure from reason, its flight from naturalism, and its emphasis on the textuality of text, this novel serves up a heady concoction. Readers curious as to why Postmodern fiction has proved to be so contentious need look no further than this exuberant and challenging novel. VA
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1900s
Correction
Thomas Bernhard
Lifespan | b. 1931 (Netherlands), d. 1989 (Austria)
First Published | 1975
First Published by | Suhrkamp (Frankfurt)
Original Title | Korrektur
In this demanding masterpiece, Thomas Bernhard recounts the self-destruction of an eccentric and brilliant scientist, Roithamer, who is fanatically obsessed with achieving perfection in his design and building of a giant cone-shaped home for his sister. The novel consists of two parts. The first part is narrated by Roithamer’s friend, a mathematician, who has returned to Austria from England following Roithamer’s suicide in order to sort out his papers. The second part is a selection from Roithamer’s papers. It traces the development of Roithamer’s work and explores his solipsistic nihilism, cultural exile, and passionate love and hatred of Austria.
Correction is Bernhard’s most sustained expression of his fascination with Wittgenstein. Roithamer shares many biographical details with Wittgenstein, but more important is the latter’s rejection of his social and cultural background and inheritance, his ascetic genius, and the purity and rigor of his thought and philosophical method. Roithamer’s compulsive pursuit results in his sister’s death, a death he has brought about despite his great love for her. In killing his sister, he kills himself. She represents a more complete emotional and artistic self than the hyper-intellectual Roithamer.
The novel’s strength lies largely in the energy of the tormented prose. It is a perfectly paced, complex study of the dangers of intellectual obsession and Bernhard’s most serious working of the issues that he dealt with throughout his writing career. AL
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1900s
A Dance to the Music of Time
Anthony Powell
Lifespan | b. 1905 (England), d. 2000
First Published | 1951–1975
First Published by | Heinemann (London)
Full Series Includes | Twelve volumes
The eleventh volume in A Dance to the Music of Time, here pictured with its original UK hardback jacket.
This series of twelve novels, each short enough to read in a day and comprehensible if read in isolation, is an English response to Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Nick Jenkins, the mild hero of Powell’s magnum opus, like Proust’s narrator, observes the comic and amazing antics of his contemporaries from his schooldays at Eton in the 1920s to old age in the 1970s. The first three volumes (sometimes published together as “Spring”) deal with school, university, and early life in London. The next three (“Summer”) take us up to the war and through, among other things, love. The third set (“Autumn”) deals with the farcical and fascinating events of 1939–1945 as seen from the entirely personal, worm’s-eye view of a junior officer. The final three volumes (“Winter”) find Jenkins involved in the mixed scenarios of his middle and later age: a literary conference in Venice, and English country life.
However, as with Proust, the joy of these addictive novels does not lie in their plots or in the portrait they give, such as it is, of half a century of largely upper-class English life. Powell’s success comes from his comedy, his characterizations, and his style—the first two of these being indivisible from the third. Beautifully written, his assessments of the private experiences of his hero comfort us and steady our view of the world. Everything, in his quiet but elegant prose, becomes matter for comedy and puzzlement. Prime among his triumphs of character is the monstrous egoist, Kenneth Widmerpool, who features in each of the novels, appearing always in a new and more repellent incarnation until his final comeuppance in the last volume. Widmerpool might be taken as the perfect symbol of a century gone mad; Nick Jenkins, who soldiers quietly on, goes some way toward restoring the balance. PM
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1900s
W, or the Memory of Childhood
Georges Perec
Lifespan | b. 1936 (France), d. 1982
First Published | 1975
First Published by | Éditions Denoël (Paris)
Original Title | W, ou le souvenir d’enfance
Georges Perec’s compelling fictional autobiography alternates between two very different, apparently unrelated narratives. In the first, the narrator is told a curious story about a boy lost at sea, and an island called W, where a fictional society is organized around sport. The second story is autobiographical: still in the first person, Perec, who was born into a family of Polish Jews in 1936, narrates episodes from his childhood and boarding school years in the south of France. The customs and organization of the imagined Olympian society are presented with the accuracy and precision of a factual account. The facts of Perec’s life, however, appear as mutable and as open to revision as fiction. Perec claims not to have any childhood memories, and false memory, doubt, and uncertainty beset his memoir. Dates, measurements, statistics, certificates and other official documentation of fact, however precise, do nothing to describe the inexpressible horror of Auschwitz, where Perec’s mother was sent in 1943. The imaginary account of life on W, where the athletes are identified by a sign stitched to their shirts, where failure to achieve is punished by food deprivation, where a kind of utopia slowly converts to a Nazi death camp—goes some way toward filling in the blanks. With W or the Memory of Childhood Perec effectively reinvents the autobiographical form for the twentieth century. KB
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1900s
Autumn of the Patriarch
Gabriel García Márquez
Lifespan | b. 1928 (Colombia)
First Published | 1975
First Published by | Plaza & Janés (Barcelona)
Original Title | El otoño del patriarca
Autumn of the Patriarch is García Márquez’s most demanding and most experimental novel. It is also the most un
derrated—a novel all too often eclipsed by his more commercially successful work, and the cause of much confusion among critics: the novel is described by Garcia Márquez himself as “a poem on the solitude of power.” At its center is a nameless South American dictator whose political genius is offset by his profound sense of loneliness and paranoia. The Patriarch is a synthesis of the various autocrats and lunatics who have held office during the twentieth century. He is a creature of pure cruelty and pure despair, holding sway over a long-suffering population through the mythic aura he has created for himself. After revolutionaries discover the Patriarch’s decomposing body in his palace, a fantastical space of unimaginable riches, Márquez unleashes a great torrent of words, rebuilding the public and private life of the deceased tyrant from the fragments he has left.
The novel unfolds through six sections of almost entirely unpunctuated prose, often recalling Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in the final chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses. Space and time are consistently disrupted, with the narrative taking unexpected detours into real historical events and wild flights of fancy. The novel is a remarkable study in charisma, corruption, violence, and the apparatus of political power. SamT
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1900s
Patterns of Childhood
Christa Wolf
Lifespan | b. 1929 (Germany)
First Published | 1976
First Published by | Aufbau Verlag (Berlin)
Original Title | Kindheitsmuster
“You imagine a nation of sleepers, a people whose dreaming brains are complying with the given command: Cancel cancel cancel.”
At the heart of Patterns of Childhood is the nature of the complex relationship between the adult and the child she once was. Can the one really leave the other behind? And will a child who has received all her earliest impressions in Nazi Germany ever be free from the period’s influence?
Nelly Jordan, the autobiographical narrator of Patterns of Childhood, sets out to reflect on these questions when she revisits her home town, L, now the Polish G. The last time Nelly saw L was as a child, at the climax of the Second World War, as she fled from the Russian advance. The visit is a catalyst for painful memories: images she has suppressed rise again as she looks at a childhood under the Nazis with the eyes of a grown-up citizen of East Germany. Nelly’s shocking conclusion is that the casual fascism in the day-to-day existence of her family and those they knew then is not so far removed from the cowardice and hypocrisy of the socialist G.D.R. of the time at which she was writing. A country of Nazis cannot overnight be turned into one populated by socialist heroes. Change, if it happens at all, will happen incrementally. Patterns is remarkable for its recognition that it is necessary to look at Germany’s past with total honesty, notwithstanding the discomfort this entails. Christa Wolf’s resolution in challenging the ideology of the G.D.R. earned her admiration and respect in Germany and beyond. MM
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1900s
Blaming
Elizabeth Taylor
Lifespan | b. 1912 (England), d. 1975
First Published | 1976
First Published by | Chatto & Windus (London)
Original Language | English
Elizabeth Taylor’s final novel, Blaming, is a detached account of emotional rigidity, sympathetic yet unsparing in its portrait of the upper middle class. As the story begins, Amy copes with the death of her husband on a cruise around the Mediterranean. She is accompanied back to London by a chance acquaintance, Martha, a young American novelist. There is an obvious incompatibility between the restrained Englishwoman and the demonstrative American. But, looking beyond cultural stereotypes, Taylor reminds us that even the nicest people can be petty-minded. This mean-spiritedness is often manifested through penny-pinching—resentment over a taxi fare or lights left on in the house. Taylor shows how thoughtless actions sometimes have devastating consequences, drawing the reader into her character’s shame, embarrassment, and remorse.
“Tragedy” seems too grandiose a term for a book so grounded in the mundane; and the closing pages do bring a happy ending of sorts. But this is tragedy in its truest sense, a mesmerizing spiral of unintended consequences. The writing is enriched by life-enhancing comedy—most notably the passages concerning Amy’s fogeyish son, James, and her shrewd granddaughters, Isobel and Dora. While Taylor is an acute observer of social conventions in the early 1970s, the novel has a fluid, timeless quality that transcends its specific milieu. ACo
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1900s
Cutter and Bone
Newton Thornburg
Lifespan | b. 1929 (U.S.)
First Published | 1976
First Published by | Little, Brown & Co. (Boston)
Full Name | Newton Kendall Thornburg
A lost masterpiece of the Vietnam era, Newton Thornburg’s Cutter and Bone traces the domestic fallout of a period of protest that promised social and political revolution but ultimately produced little change. At the novel’s heart is the relationship between Alex Cutter, an alcoholic, disillusioned, crippled Vietnam veteran, and Bone, a self-interested gigolo. When Bone witnesses a figure dumping a woman’s corpse in a trashcan, and identifies the killer as conglomerate tycoon J. J. Wolfe, the two men decide to pursue Wolfe for profit and justice.
Thornburg makes sure that the reader is never certain about anything. Is Cutter really as self-interested as he pretends or does his antipathy for Wolfe conceal an underlying political motive? Is the fire that kills his wife and baby the result of Cutter’s own negligence or his pursuit of Wolfe? Grieving for himself and for his country, which has sold its soul to corporations and has lost its way in Southeast Asia, Cutter’s mission to bring down Wolfe is either the last act of an heroic man with nothing to lose or the product of a deranged mind. The novel is an extended suicide note in which Cutter’s disillusionment is mitigated only by a bittersweet acknowledgement that the world is as lost as he imagines it to be. AP
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1900s
Interview With the Vampire
Anne Rice
Lifespan | b. 1941 (U.S.)
First Published | 1976
First Published by | Alfred A. Knopf (New York)
Given Name | Howard Allen O’Brien
“The vampire smiled.”
Across a long series of books, Anne Rice has substantially reworked the ancient legends of the vampire into a more modern mold. Her vampires take on many of the qualities of Dracula, but she portrays a more eroticized and more violent world than Bram Stoker, one that is brought up to date and resituated in her home town of New Orleans.
The central figure of Interview With the Vampire is Louis, who has been a vampire for two hundred years and is gifted, or cursed, with immortal life. As he tells his story, we begin to understand what such a life might be like. Vampires see the world through different senses—their world is at once more brutal and yet more startlingly vivid than it can ever be to mere human perception. Louis himself, however, is plagued by doubt: doubt as to how he has come into this condition, doubt as to what combination of gods and devils are actually responsible for his plight. Furthermore, he is a vampire with a conscience. Unwilling to feed off humans, he tries to assuage his uncontrollable appetite in other ways. It is a measure of the strength of the book that this improbable situation never veers into being mawkish or sentimental; the reader is brought to understand both the terrors and the attractions of being an outcast, not only from humankind but also to a large extent from the other vampires who are, perforce, his only kind.
Permeating this dilemma are the bright lights and shadows of New Orleans, a city at once ancient and modern, broodingly pagan and showily contemporary. In Interview With the Vampire, a novel of brilliant chiaroscuro, we find ourselves immersed in a nighttime world that sometimes seems to be the negative image of the world we perceive through our limited human senses. DP
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The Left-Handed Woman
Peter Handke
Lifespan | b. 1942 (Austria)
First Published | 1976
First Published by | Suhrkamp (Frankfurt)
Original Title | Die linkshändige Frau
Peter Handke was very much the enfant terrible of Austrian literature in the late 1960s and 1970s, whose wide-ranging output explores political, aesthetic, psychological, and philosophical issues unflinchingly, even aggressively. This novella, a story of existential crisis narrated in spare, icy prose, is a fine example of his rigorous Modernism. Disaffected housewife Marianne, in a moment of spontaneous self-assertion, decides to split up with her husband, the father of her eight-year-old son. Over the course of several days of self-imposed near-isolation, she attempts to rediscover a sense of independence and identity beyond marriage and motherhood.
Handke discourages subjective identification with characters. Marianne, for example, is referred to by the narrator simply as “the woman,” her son Stefan for the most part as “the child.” The narrator avoids descriptive detail and interior monologues, and translates the characters’ inner confusion into a narrative of disjointed dialogue and awkward silences. The message is that personal identity is fragile and difficult to maintain; it is threatened even by everyday acts of naming and description. The symbolic idea of “left-handedness” evokes this desire for individuality, for the right to be different, and the text concludes on a reservedly optimistic note when Marianne asserts: “You haven’t betrayed yourself. And no one will humiliate you any more.” JH
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 78